It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: Your child has been hurt, badly. He’s been admitted to hospital. He has head injuries and perhaps permanent brain damage.

Most parents will never end up in this situation. But it’s exactly the situation that Dawn Hollingsworth found herself in recently, when a group of children – including her eleven-year-old son Tyler – attempted to replicate a stunt they’d seen on YouTube: the roundabout of death.

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While Tyler sat on a playground roundabout, an older kid spun it around with the wheel of his moped. The G-force was so intense that Tyler quickly fell unconscious. The other children fled, and a passerby called an ambulance. When Tyler arrived at the hospital, his eyes were bulging and bloodshot, and his brain swollen.

It’s not clear at this stage whether Tyler was a willing participant in this stunt or was forced to do it by the older children. What is clear, though, is that human beings – male human beings in particular – often engage in such activities, voluntarily and with apparent enthusiasm. The roundabout of death is just the tip of the iceberg; other recent examples include the Kiki challenge, the Tide Pod challenge, and rooftopping.

All these odd antics raise an interesting and deceptively difficult question. Humans are products of natural selection, and natural selection fashions creatures adept at surviving and reproducing. At best, these viral stunts are a pointless distraction from that ancient biological task; at worst, they involve putting one’s life on the line with no apparent Darwinian payoff. And it’s not just stunts and dares that should puzzle us. Many aspects of human behaviour, from smoking cigarettes to munching junk food to giving up one’s life for one’s faith, seem contrary to the dictates of evolution. How could such behaviour be adaptive?

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The short answer is that it’s probably not adaptive. But the psychological capacities that make it possible almost certainly are. To see why, we need to get to the heart of what makes us unique: culture.

Culture is the real secret of our success as a species; it’s the reason we’re found on every continent and sometimes even on the moon, and the reason that the Earth’s fate now rests in our hands. According to many cultural evolutionists, a big part of what makes culture possible for our species is the ability to copy each other.

Humans do this compulsively and the advantages are plain to see. If you know how to make a canoe and I don’t, it’s much more efficient for me to copy the trick from you than to work it out myself from scratch. Moreover, having done so, I’ve then got time left over to improve on your technique. Later, someone else might copy my new-and-improved canoe, and make additional improvements of their own.

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In this way, our tools, ideas, and practices – our memes, to use Richard Dawkins’ term – evolve over time to be more and more sophisticated and powerful. This process is called cumulative cultural evolution, and it rests on our capacity to copy each other: to steal ideas from one another’s brains. More than any other animal, humans are natural-born copycats.

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Not only that, but we’re discerning copycats. Cultural evolutionists have argued that we don’t just copy anyone or anything, but have a suite of evolved learning biases that boost our chances of copying memes that are useful. One important example is known as the prestige bias. This refers to our tendency to copy people who have high prestige and status – generally a better bet than copying those with low prestige or low status. Another example is the conformity bias. This refers to our tendency to copy the memes of the majority, which is often a more successful strategy than copying rare memes or going it alone.

But hang on. If our copycat tendencies and learning biases are such an evolutionary blessing, why do we so often pick up maladaptive behaviour? Why do we eat Tide Pods, latch onto superstitions, or refuse to vaccinate our children?

Simple: adaptations aren’t perfect. For a trait to be selected, it doesn’t have to produce adaptive behaviour every time. It only has to do so on average. On top of that, natural selection doesn’t have foresight. As soon as the capacity for culture evolved in our species, there was nothing to stop culture from spiralling off in new and unexpected directions. These loopholes immediately open up the possibility of maladaptive memes.

In fact, given the design specs of our learning biases, maladaptive memes are a virtual certainty. Consider the prestige bias. When we copy a prestigious person, we don’t just copy the things that made them a success. We often copy irrelevant things as well, including clothes, political views, and drug habits. Advertisers exploit this chink in our armour when they pay celebrities to endorse their products. There’s no good reason to think that skill on the football pitch goes hand-in-hand with skill in choosing the best brand of underwear or the best spray deodorant. Yet otherwise-rational people act as if it does.

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Admittedly, this isn’t especially harmful. But the tendency to copy prestigious people certainly can be. In fact, it can be fatal. A stark example is the phenomenon of copycat suicide. When a suicide is splashed across the news, at-risk individuals sometimes copy the victim and take their own lives as well. There’s some evidence that the higher in status the original victim was, the more likely these copycat suicides become. Thus, the prestige bias can sometimes lead to the acquisition of lethal memes. The same is true of all our learning biases.

If memes are too lethal, they tend to burn themselves out. During the heyday of European colonialism, a number of indigenous groups came to believe that, if they had faith, the Europeans’ bullets couldn’t harm them. Needless to say, this meme had disastrous consequences. One group infected with the meme – the Mahdists of Sudan – lost 11,000 men in a single battle to the bullets of Kitchener’s army. This was bad for them obviously, but it was also bad for the meme. In effect, the meme removed itself from the “meme pool” through its effects on its hosts’ behaviour.

But although ultra-lethal memes are likely to be rare, humans will probably always be plagued by less-lethal-but-nonetheless-dangerous memes – memes like the roundabout of death. This is the price we pay for being a hyper-cultural species.

Steve Stewart-Williams is author of The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve